The New York Times Architecture section ran an interesting piece on famous architects and their plans for their personal collections. If you thought architecture collections are art, you’re right, and these rock stars are asking big bucks for their personal collections. How big? The article doesn’t give specifics but when the Museum of Modern Art is saying some of these are out of their price range, you know these famous architects are asking for some serious change.

Rock star Frank Gehry’s collection is mentioned specifically:
“the archive may be in its own class in terms of size, consisting of about 30,000 square feet of models, a slide library, a digital archive and more than 5,000 drawings.”

Now that’s a lot of models. The real expense seems to be in the storage and keeping a staff on board to catalog, organize, and retrieve information from the collection.

The article finishes on a bit of a downer mentioning that architects Billie Tsien and Tod Williams typically let their models collect dust in a corner until they completely deteriorate or they pitch them.